This invention relates to dental tools used to facilitate cavity repairs.
In dentistry it is a common practice to repair cavities by drilling out the decayed material to form a cavity preparation and filling the cavity preparation with some type of restoration material. When preparing cavities in two adjacent teeth with a common interproximal contact, it is typical practice to form the cavity preparations and then fill the preparations with a restoration material such as soft amalgam by arranging a flexible metal matrix band around each of the teeth, placing a triangular shaped wooden wedge in the interproximal space just above the gum line, filling the cavity preparations with the restoration material, permitting the filling material to condense or partially solidify, and removing the wedge and matrix bands. Since the bands are in common contact in the space between the adjacent teeth, care must be taken in removing each band to avoid dislodging the soft freshly placed restoration material. Since bands are typically used more than once, over time they develop dimples, wrinkles and other surface irregularities which tend to exacerbate this problem. To date the dentist has relied upon either his manual skill alone to remove each band, or has employed one of the dental tools used in packing the filler material into the cavity preparation to try to prevent the removal of the matrix band from dislodging the soft filler material. This technique is, at best, less than optimal since the tool can only be used to press down on a single tooth surface at any given time, and thus must be relocated on the surface of the other tooth prior to removing the second matrix band. As a result, matrix band removal from adjacent teeth remains one of the more time consuming procedures prone to manual error.